Double bass drumming

A story of how I reached from 60 bpm to 130 bpm clean double bass technique in 2 weeks without bass pedals

Double bass, in theory, is very simple. There are 2 bass pedals and you alternate between your legs to get that clean, equally spaced THUDs. I’ve always been fascinated by the effect double bass can have on a song just by sheer power. It is a very handy and easy hack for drummers to spice up any beat!

In my 2 years of drumming experience, I always put aside practising double bass drumming for the future. Leg muscles comparatively take a lot of time to develop and I was afraid I would have to invest a lot of my practise time just kicking the bass while I can learn other rudiments and grooves.

Finally, the day arrived when I decided to cover Nightmare by Avenged Sevenfold.

Drum cover coming soon! Subscribe to Sonikblasts YouTube to be updated! :)

It had 4 lines of double bass chorus section at 130 bpm and I had a 2 week deadline. Of course I couldn’t sit days and nights kicking the bass and ignore the rest of the song. So I practised the song during my practice times and kicked the bass the rest of my entire day (except for sleep hours!)

Yes, you heard it right. The rest of day was dedicated to kicking the bass with double bass pedals. Well, imaginary ones. A little googling gave me different ways to practise double bass anywhere without the pedal.

While the floor exercises in the above video helped develop and strengthen my muscles, I had to come up with a new exercise to achieve equally spaced clean double bass.

In theory, you take 4 bars of 4/4 time signature. Start with 8th notes on right leg bass for 1 bar and then shift to 16th notes starting with left leg bass for the next bar. Repeat the same for the next 2 bars this time starting with left leg bass. The drum sheet and the next video demonstrate the same.

Now, this exercise is easy. But you want to do it all day wherever and whenever possible. First pick any of the 3 floor exercises from the first video and apply this exercise to it. Start slow, say at 60 bpm, and work on building the muscle memory such that you don’t have to think about when to switch your legs or when to switch between note divisions. Once you get it into your system you can keep practising it while you do anything!

I picked the heel up floor exercise as it is much closer to the actual motion of the playing the bass drum and practised the alternating legs exercise for 2 weeks straight. While I code, while I watch a movie, while I play cards with friends, while I’m waiting in long traffic jams or while I’m going on a 1 day vacation in the car! I always had my legs practising that exercise.

3 major things to note here:

1. Practise at 60 bpm as long as it takes to build the muscle memory. If not you wan’t be able to multitask with this exercise.
2. Always have a metronome running in the background. Keep the volume really low or use a visual metronome or periodically listen to it on ear phones. Whichever suits you and the situation you are in. The idea is to keep tracking periodically if you are on the right tempo or not. This would also be your measure of how comfortable you got at that tempo.
3. Make sure that both your heals always raise upto the same level and touch the ground while practise. This is very essential to get equally spaced double bass drumming.

And that’s it! Just give 2 weeks to this madness, keep practising wherever you go, whatever you do, whenever possible. And trust me your double bass will start sounding much like it should be by the end of 2 weeks! Here is my double bass at 130 bpm after 2 weeks…

Hope you guys can benefit out of this. Please subscribe to Sonikblasts for more drumming related stuff! :)

Cheers, drum on!